According to reports, MSI is preparing a new portable gaming PC to take on rivals like the Lenovo Legion Go and Asus ROG Ally, as well as Valve’s Steam Deck. Following a brief teaser yesterday, VideoCardz discovered images of MSI’s Claw handheld on X (formerly Twitter). (Yes, the name is really Claw; prepare your GIFs for the comments section.)
The Claw resembles Asus’ ROG Ally in appearance, down to the offset thumbsticks that seem to include RGB illumination. Leaked benchmarks indicate that one of Intel’s newest Meteor Lake processors would power MSI’s handheld device, which is an unexpected decision considering that AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip was chosen by both Lenovo and Asus.
Once the gadget is formally launched, we’ll have to wait and see how this new Meteor Lake processor handles games—Intel doesn’t exactly have the best history when it comes to GPU drivers. Additionally, according to the leaked specifications, the MSI Claw will feature 32GB of RAM, which is twice as much as the Legion Go or ROG Ally.
However, the screen size, resolution, and whether or not MSI is using an OLED panel are not mentioned in the leaks. It appears to be about the same size as the seven-inch screen on the ROG Ally based on the leaked photo. In any case, there will probably be a lot more talk about the Claw during CES next week given the teasing from MSI and the actions of leakers.
